Wilkie Collins and the Visual Arts

Wilkie's father William Collins (1738-1827) was a Royal Academician, whose
paintings fetched prices that rivalled those of Constable. . . . His brother
Charlie was an associate of the
Pre-Raphaelites, and Wilkie himself had close
relations with painters all his life, especially
John Everett Millais and
Holman Hunt ("the same sweet fellow as
always"), whose painting "The Triumph of the
Innocents" he found incomparable: "Nothing in modern art has ever done that can be
put on a level with it." — John Bowen, "Champagne Moments."